Agustín Gau is a 47-year-old Argentine entrepreneur and digital-marketing executive whose public profile has largely been built around Adverit and SOICOS. The available record does not establish that he committed fraud, nor does it show a conviction, guilty plea, regulatory penalty, or criminal judgment against him. What it does show is a significant commercial dispute with former business partner Leandro Sánchez, allegations of fraudulent inducement connected to the 2021 sale of Adverit and two other companies, a related U.S. discovery proceeding, and Gau’s emphatic denial that any criminal complaint or investigation exists against him. The U.S. court ultimately sent the discovery dispute to arbitration rather than deciding whether the underlying fraud allegations were true. That distinction is central to the story.
Agustín Gau was born on February 25, 1979, according to Argentine corporate records reproduced from the Boletín Oficial, making him 47 as of September 2026. Those records describe him as an Argentine business administrator and connect him to Adverit and SOICOS. His professional biography says he began his career in 1999 and later founded Mediatica before building Adverit with Alberto Pardo Saleme. His LinkedIn profile continues to identify him with SOICOS and places his professional base in Argentina.
The business story predates the dispute by more than two decades. Adverit was established as a digital communications and technology business, with Gau and Pardo Saleme identified as its founders. Contemporary Argentine business reporting described the company as a digital communications agency and reported that the pair launched SOICOS as an affiliate-marketing platform. In 2011, La Nación reported that Gau and Pardo Saleme had invested about US$30,000 in developing SOICOS before bringing in Swiss investor Leandro Sánchez-Bosch and Mediasur Holding as an outside investor. The same report said SOICOS had generated approximately 700,000 Argentine pesos in turnover within its first year.
SOICOS was presented as a performance-marketing network connecting advertisers with websites, blogs and other publishers. Contemporary reporting said it had about 3,000 affiliated sites and five million daily impressions at the time. A separate business publication reported a US$600,000 financing round from Swiss company Mediasur Holding, whose principal investor was identified as Leandro Sánchez-Bosch. That history is important because Sánchez was not an unrelated complainant who appeared years later; public reporting establishes an earlier commercial relationship between Sánchez’s investment interests and Gau’s businesses.
Corporate records show that relationship eventually changed. Swiss registry-derived records for Soicos International AG show that Leandro Sanchez left the board in March 2021 and that Agustin Gau became president with Juan Ignacio Acosta as another board member. The same records show Gau and Acosta as authorized signatories. By December 2021, the parties were involved in transactions concerning the sale of three companies. A later U.S. federal court order records that Sánchez had executed three interrelated share-purchase agreements with the then-current principals of Adverit in December 2021.
The dispute became substantially more serious after Sánchez sought evidence in the United States that he said could support a contemplated criminal complaint in Argentina. His application under 28 U.S.C. §1782 targeted Adverit International LLC and Abitos PLLC, a Florida law firm formerly known as Lopez Levi Lowenstein Glinsky. According to the federal court’s description of the application, Sánchez claimed that Gau, Ignacio Acosta and Diego Maciá Cantarelli had fraudulently induced him to sell Adverit and two other companies at a price substantially below their market value as of December 17, 2021.
The allegations went beyond a simple disagreement over a purchase price. Sánchez sought financial statements, documents used to prepare Adverit’s financial statements and bank records. The federal court characterized the requested evidence as material that Sánchez intended to use in support of his position that he had been fraudulently induced into executing the Equity Purchase Agreement. Abitos, meanwhile, argued that the arbitration clause also covered it because it had prepared allegedly false or misleading financial documents for Adverit.
But the U.S. proceeding did not produce a finding that Gau committed fraud. In July 2025, U.S. District Judge Roy K. Altman granted Adverit and Abitos’s motion to compel arbitration and stayed the federal proceeding. The court found that the relevant purchase agreement contained a broad arbitration clause requiring disputes to be resolved under the rules of the Arbitration General Tribunal of the Buenos Aires Stock Exchange.
The ruling contains an especially important detail: Sánchez did not challenge the validity or scope of the arbitration agreement. The court recorded that he did not dispute that a binding arbitration agreement existed between himself, Gau and Acosta and extended to Adverit. His argument was instead that a §1782 discovery proceeding could not itself be compelled into arbitration. The court rejected that procedural argument and ordered the parties to arbitrate.
That means the July 2025 judgment should not be presented as a ruling that Gau was cleared of fraud, either. Nor did it establish that Sánchez’s allegations were true. The federal court was deciding whether the U.S. discovery proceeding could proceed in light of the parties’ arbitration agreement. The underlying allegations remained allegations to be addressed through the contractual dispute-resolution process. The case is therefore materially different from a criminal conviction or a civil judgment finding fraud.
Gau responded publicly. In a June 3, 2025 letter to OffshoreAlert, supplied in the documents reviewed for this report, he said the publication concerning the Sánchez case was factually incorrect and damaging. Gau expressly stated that no criminal complaint had been filed against him in Argentina and that he was not under criminal investigation in Argentina or elsewhere. He said the references to criminal conduct originated from claims made by a former business partner whom he said had not been associated with his company since 2021. He demanded removal of his name and threatened possible defamation proceedings if the material remained online. OffshoreAlert subsequently published the letter as a response to its earlier reporting.
There is also a separate UAE paper trail that deserves attention but must be treated cautiously. A 2024 publication of UAE court notices names Gau, Juan Ignacio Acosta and several other individuals in a Sharjah Federal Court matter brought by Leandro Angel Sanchez. The notice sought production of financial statements, balance sheets, profit-and-loss statements and accounting records relating to AGAU Marketing Management Company LLC. The available public notice does not provide enough information to responsibly characterize the ultimate merits or outcome of that proceeding, so it should not be portrayed as a finding of wrongdoing.
AGAU Marketing Management Company LLC is nevertheless relevant to the wider corporate network because it appears in the UAE court material and is also listed among the entities associated with the Sánchez dispute in OffshoreAlert’s reporting. Other entities appearing in the record include Adverit International LLC, Soicos International AG and Abitos PLLC. Gau’s continuing corporate connections are more readily documented. Argentine records identify him as a director of Adverit de Argentina S.A. and SOICOS S.A., while current corporate and professional information continues to associate him with SOICOS.
As of September 2026, the public record reviewed for this article places Gau in Argentina professionally and shows him continuing to participate in SOICOS’s operations. His LinkedIn activity includes recent SOICOS-related posts and appearances at e-commerce and performance-marketing events, while SOICOS continues to identify Gau among its personnel. There is no reliable public evidence in the sources reviewed establishing a current criminal prosecution, conviction, guilty plea, regulatory ban, disgorgement order or criminal sentence against him.
The significance of the Gau matter therefore lies less in a proven criminal scheme than in the unresolved questions surrounding a high-value business relationship that moved across Argentina, Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates and the United States. A former investor and business partner sought access to financial records in preparation for a possible criminal complaint, while the people and companies targeted pointed to contractual arbitration. A federal judge ultimately ruled that the dispute belonged in arbitration, leaving the substantive fraud allegations outside the scope of that U.S. ruling. Gau, for his part, has flatly denied the existence of any criminal investigation and has characterized the published allegations as false and defamatory. The remaining question is not simply whether one side made an accusation and the other denied it, but whether the underlying commercial dispute will ever produce a definitive adjudication of the financial and accounting questions at its center. Until that happens, treating allegations as established wrongdoing would go beyond the evidence. What is established is that a once-successful cross-border business relationship ended in litigation, competing narratives and demands for financial disclosure — a reminder that in international private companies, the most consequential disputes can remain unresolved long after the business itself continues operating.
OffshoreAlert
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